Pack Rat

I’ve spent the last two days going through everything in my new office to determine what needs to be kept and what can be binned.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m the first person in the school to ever do this.

Right now there is a pile of junk in the middle of the room that is about a metre high and two metres in diameter. That’s just the stuff for the regular trash. There are another three boxes of equipment in the hallway that require specialist WEEE disposal, much of which has not been functional in years, plus a ten-year-old server and its CRT monitor. The entire back bench of the office was, on Monday, filled with box upon box of hoarded installation CDs, with all the paperwork that ever came with them. There was even a box of floppy disks dating back to the 80s. Today there are 15 discs in cases, and about 90 in an empty ‘cakebox’ that used to contain blank CD-Rs. The tiny fraction of paperwork that wasn’t needless is in the filing cabinet. I’ve thrown away about three to four hundred CDs that were either duplicates, superseded, or completely unnecessary.

So, after tomorrow, when I spend what will feel like forever carting my trash mountain to the bins, the office will be tidy.

I then have to make a start on the shelves next door, and after that, the storage room.

Initial indications are that the junk back there is even older. I know there’s a server hiding back there somewhere that pre-dates the one I’ve already junked . The previous NM extracted a Sinclair ZX81 from the collection just before he left, and I recently spotted a piece of hardware in a cupboard (that I shall reveal to you at a later date) the likes of which I last saw when I was 5.

Two years ago while on the search for a place to store a laptop trolley I came across a large locked store cupboard that no one appeared to be responsible for. The door was locked, there was no window, no one had a key or could even remember anyone ever going in the room. When the door was forced, did we find IT treasure? Nope. Just three very old TVs on stands, a couple of OHPs and stacks of multicoloured paper. I was very disappointed and so was the crowd who had come to watch. Hey! This counts as excitement at our place.

My guess at your hardware find… an RM 380Z with the black case with silver handles.

I went through our entire ICT suite last summer. Found 3 BBC B’s and their associated Cub screens, a suitcase full of old floppies, floor turtles innumerable, etc. We needed 5 trips with the flatbed van to shift all the junk, and that was without shifting the 40 10 year old PCs that had been stuffed under the desks.

My first two days of the ‘last school job’ were spent scouring the place for any hardware that was of relative retro use to sell on ebay to raise the funds for the WEEE disposal of the rest of the crap. Roomfulls of stuff that nobody had thought to get rid of. Taking up hideous amounts of potentially useful space. Space that was supposedly at a huge premium, at least that was what I was told when I wanted more of it for my office.

(Actually I lie. I didn’t use ebay funds for WEEE disposal. More like beer disposal. I’ll refrain from making a pun about how this might also equate to WEEE disposal.)

That ZX81 may well have my fingerprints on it. I remember great excitement when a member of teaching staff-still there-set up a computer club at lunchtime. Resources were few, but the ZX81 was joined by one of those printers that used rolls of silver toilet paper and, of course, a standard domestic cassette player. I would guess that this was in 1982 or 1983. Happy days!